Last Week Tonight with John Oliver had a solid premiere on Sunday, which included a real-talk interview with recently retired NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander. Nine minutes is a long time to go without saying something weird or clueless about the Internet, but Alexander really outdid himself in this segment. For a guy who ran one of the most massive Internet surveillance programs in the world, he doesn't seem to actually use the Internet very much.

For the first few minutes of the discussion, Oliver goaded Alexander about the NSA's reputation for aggressive, possibly invasive data collection. Oliver asked, "Do you think that the NSA is suffering from a perception problem with the American people at the moment? Bearing in mind that the answer to that question is yes." After a few minutes Alexander explained, "I am the biggest advocate of freedom of the networks, Internet, and if we could come up with a way of segregating all the terrorist communications ... it would really help us. And protect our civil liberties and privacy."

If that were possible, it would certainly help, yeah. Then Alexander remembered a suggestion he had heard once, and attempted to paraphrase it with corresponding gestures: "You know, what we really need to do is all the bad guys need to be on this section of the Internet. And they only operate over here. All good people operate over here. All bad guys over here."

It sounds convenient, except what is this guy talking about?

In an attempt to refocus, Oliver made a joke about how the worst web users were already all together on Pinterest, corralled into that single part of the Internet. Alexander tried to play along, but eventually had to admit that he didn't know what Pinterest was. Alexander was a good sport throughout the interview, and he tried to deliver a serious pitch about the NSA amidst Oliver's chaos. But when he joked that since he hadn't heard of Pinterest he must have "led a sheltered life," things kind of went downhill.

There's a promising trailer out today for "The Internet's Own Boy," Brian Knappenberger’s Kickstarter-funded documentary about Aaron Swartz. The film, which opens June 27, looks like it has a chance to provide some thought-provoking policy context and framing for what happened to the late Internet freedom advocate, Reddit co-founder, and hacktivist.*

Swartz committed suicide in January 2013 at age 26, but his reach and impact on the tech and tech-policy worlds were already enormous. A computer-programming prodigy, he worked on projects like RSS and Creative Commons before he was 16. He dove into politics and became an advocate and activist for publicly available content and an open Internet. But by the time of his death, Swartz was being federally prosecuted for downloading a huge quantity of copyrighted material from JSTOR, the online academic library, at MIT. He was facing jail time and fines.

The central question of Knappenberger's documentary, which premiered at Sundance, seems to be whether Swartz was prosecuted justly, or whether prosecuters were trying to make an example out of him. (The trailer suggests that the documentary leans strongly toward the latter interpretation.) Though Swartz' death precipitated a slew of worthy Internet long-reads, including one by Slate's own Justin Peters, the documentary has the potential to reach a fresh audience, including people who only skimmed the news at the time of his death. And the apparent focus on broader societal forces, including the justice system, is in keeping with Swartz's own priorities. So even if "The Internet's Own Boy" is mediocre, it could still be useful. But it looks great.

Previously in Slate:

• Aaron Swartz Wanted to Save the World. Why Couldn't He Save Himself?
  
• A Year After Aaron Swartz's Death, Our Terrible Computer Crime Laws Remain Unchanged

Correction, April 29, 2014: This post originally stated that the release date for "The Internet's Own Boy" is July 27. It is actually June 27.

Selfies and secretaries of the Navy aren’t something you usually think about together. But the signature photo technique of today’s teenagers seems to have infiltrated even the highest echelons of U.S. security.

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus squeezed in a selfie with 16 Navy ROTC midshipmen at Arizona State University on Thursday after giving a speech about energy and security. (Disclosure: ASU is a partner with Slate and the New America Foundation in Future Tense.)

But the selfie was just a brief diversion in Mabus’ discussion about making alternative energy use a top priority in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

Environmentalists may laud Sec. Mabus for his Earth-friendly agenda, but finding alternative energy sources to fuel ships and aircraft is about war, not climate change, Mabus said.

“We’re doing this to become better warfighters. That’s the only reason,” he said. “There are some good side effects—things like reducing carbon and things like climate change—but that’s not the reason we’re doing it. We’re doing it to reduce a vulnerability.”

Using energy as a political weapon is not a new tactic, and Mabus’ words came with a not-so-thinly-veiled stab at Russia and its inflation of natural gas prices over tensions in Ukraine. “Europe is a large customer for Russia, but Russia depends on oil and gas revenues for over half its government’s budget,” he said. “Imagine the impact alternative power and conservation measures might have.”

The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest consumer of fossil fuels in the world. Each year the Department of Defense budgets approximately $15 billion for fuel. In fiscal year 2011-2012, spikes in the price of oil cost the Department of Defense an additional $3 billion in unbudgeted fuel expenses, Sec. Mabus said.

For the Navy and Marine Corps, every $1 increase for a barrel of oil costs an extra $30 million, he said. “There aren’t many places to go and get that [money]. You have to change your operations, so you steam less, you fly less, you train less.”

Reducing operational capabilities may not be such a good idea especially when some predict instabilities due to climate change are nigh. The Navy even has a special Task Force Climate Change to address security threats that could crop up from the rise in sea level and opening of Artic sea passages in the melting polar caps.

Mabus said the Navy and Marine Corps are on-track to meeting the energy goals he laid out in 2009, which includes supplying half of all naval energy needs with alternative energy sources.

“We are going to meet these goals. It’ll make us better at our jobs. It’ll make us better warfighters. And it will make us and the world far more secure.”

Correction, April 29, 2014: The photo credit in this post originally misidentified the photographer. The photo was taken by MC1 Arif Patani, not MCC Keith DeVinney.

You'd probably expect to encounter all sorts of crazy technology in a U.S. Air Force nuclear silo. One you might not expect: floppy disks.

Leslie Stahl of CBS's 60 Minutes reported from a Wyoming nuclear control center for a segment that aired on Sunday, and the Cold War-era tech she found is pretty amazing. But it also makes sense. The government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s, and though the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven't changed much. And there isn't a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein told Stahl that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they're not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software.

While on the base, missileers showed Stahl the 8-inch floppy disks they use as part of launch commands for the missiles. Later, in an interview with Weinstein, Stahl described the disk she was shown as "gigantic," and said she had never seen one that big. Weinstein explained, "Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world."

The Air Force is planning to spend $19 million on launch control center improvements in 2014, and is seeking $600 million for additional upgrades next year. At least in Wyoming, replacing the analog phones in the base seems like job one, since 60 Minutes reports that the missileers struggle with how unreliable they are. In controlling some of the most dangerous weapons in the world, it's an odd balance between tech that's obsolete enough to be secure, but still current enough to, you know, actually work.

Previously in Slate:

• The Time the U.S. Military Came This Close to Dropping a Nuclear Bomb on North Carolina
  
• Why It's So Much Harder for the Government to Spy on Your Snail Mail Than Your Email
  
• Why the Head of Homeland Security Doesn't Use Email
  

It’s official: the current tornado outbreak is among the most severe of any two-day stretch in the past decade.

After an early season lull, Sunday was the deadliest tornado day since May 20, 2013, when an EF-5 tornado hit the Oklahoma City metro area. Sunday’s storms killed at least 16 people in Arkansas and Oklahoma, according to a Reuters report. There were 30 tornado reports in seven states on Sunday.

The ongoing tornado outbreak reached its second day on Monday, with live video from a local television station showing a large tornado approaching Tupelo, Miss.

A recent nationwide upgrade in National Weather Service radars has helped identify “debris ball” signatures such as the one in Tupelo today. The system can now systematically analyze tornado-producing clouds for objects lofted by strong winds that—unlike raindrops—aren’t round. The advance in technology has allowed forecasters to increase warning times for the most dangerous tornadoes.

A “tornado emergency” was issued by the National Weather Service in Memphis just before the tornado struck Tupelo. Those words are typically reserved for when a large tornado is headed for a heavily populated area. The same heightened language was used by forecasters in Arkansas yesterday.

Newscasters at WTVA in Tupelo evacuated the studio on live TV. One of the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history struck Tupelo nearly 80 years ago, with one famous survivor:

The Storm Prediction Center has upgraded Monday’s continuing threat to “high risk,” emphasizing that “significant tornadoes are expected.”

This is only the sixth tornado outbreak in the past 10 years featuring back-to-back high risk outlooks from the Storm Prediction Center. Each previous outbreak of this magnitude has featured at least 50 tornadoes in a two-day span. The current outbreak has been exceptionally well forecast, with early indications of a particularly severe outbreak being shown by computer weather models and historical analogs for nearly a week now.

The image at the top was captured by a National Weather Service polar orbiting satellite on Sunday evening as deadly tornadoes hit parts of Arkansas. Polar orbiting satellites can provide exceptionally high-resolution pictures of storms, orbiting at about twice the altitude of the International Space Station.

More widely used geostationary satellites, on the other hand, orbit 40 times higher. The ability of geostationary weather satellites to see half the Earth in one clean shot helps to assemble stunning animations, like this one taken of yesterday’s storms.

Damage survey teams are in Arkansas today to assess the strength of yesterday’s tornadoes. The deadliest tornado yesterday—hitting Vilonia and Mayflower—will be rated at least EF-3, according to the local National Weather Service.

The persistent storms will also create a heightened flood risk, with nearly six inches of rain expected across the region.

You’re driving down a busy suburban street when a bicyclist suddenly raises his arm and weaves out in front of you. You tap the brakes, only for the bicyclist to change his mind and settle back into his bike lane. Then, just as you’re speeding up again, he weaves in front of you again. Are you irritated yet?

Google’s self-driving car isn’t. It simply slows down again and waits politely for the cyclist to make up his mind. It will do this as many times as it takes to be sure that it can pass the cyclist without endangering anyone.

The self-driving car has been safely cruising California highways for years now. On Monday, Google released a new video (see below) highlighting its increasing aptitude for navigating city streets—or, at least, moderately busy suburban streets. While highways entail the peril of high speeds, city driving introduces far more variables to the equation for the machine-learning algorithms that govern Google’s autonomous cars. Accordingly, Google’s drivers have been logging thousands of miles in the city’s hometown of Mountain View, testing the car’s ability to deal with unpredictable obstacles ranging from jaywalkers to construction cones to cars backing into and out of parking spots.

“We’ve improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously—pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn,” writes Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car project, in a blog post. “A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can’t—and it never gets tired or distracted.”

It also never gets impatient. That sounds obvious, but it could be a godsend for bicyclists in particular if and when self-driving cars begin to replace human drivers on America’s roads. In the video below, you can see how the car’s computers process various types of actors and obstacles as they make their way through intersections and across railroad tracks.

In all cases, the car errs on the side of caution—something we human drivers could stand to do a little more often. And its decisions are rigorously data-driven. For instance, Google's car will wait for a split second when a light turns green, because research shows that red-light runners are most likely to come flying through the intersection in the first moments after the signal changes.

As far as it has come, the self-driving car technology remains very much a work in progress. This becomes evident when you read a detailed firsthand account in The Atlantic Cities today by Eric Jaffe, who recently took a ride in the back seat of a self-driving Lexus RT 450H with Google’s Dmitri Dolgov. While the overall experience is so smooth that Jaffe has to stop himself from heaping praise upon the car, there are two instances when Dolgov feels compelled to take the wheel back from the machines. Here’s Jaffe describing the first of those two human interventions:

We are in the left lane on Mountain View's West Middlefield Road when some road work appears up ahead. A dozen or so orange cones guide traffic to the right. The self-driving car slows down and announces the obstruction — "lane blocked" — but seems confused what to do next. It won't merge right, even though no cars are coming up behind us. After a few false starts, Brian Torcellini takes the wheel and steers around the cones before reengaging auto mode.

"It detected the cones and it tried to go around them, but it wasn't confident," says Dmitri Dolgov, typing at the laptop. "The car is capable of a lot of things, but unless it's absolutely sure that it can handle some situation well, it will err on the conservative side."

The second tense moment in Jaffe’s ride came when a utility truck suddenly cut off the self-driving car from the left. Dolgov reacted before the car’s computers did, and he stomped the brakes with his own foot. A few days later, Google emailed Jaffe to say that a simulation showed the self-driving car would have done the same thing if Dolgov hadn’t moved first.

That’s comforting, although only to a certain extent. The hardest part about adjusting to self-driving cars, if we ever do, will be trusting them to do the right thing even in every possible circumstance. The first fatal accident caused by “computer error”—and even the car’s backers admit there may be one eventually—is likely to cause an uproar that could set the project back years.

But here’s the thing: Even if self-driving cars never achieve perfection, it’s looking increasingly likely that they’ll prove far safer than your average cellphone-checking, selfie-snapping, road-raging, falling-asleep-at-the-wheel human driver ever was. In fact, given that Google’s cars have now logged nearly 700,000 miles without causing a single accident, it seems that they already are.

For more on the self-driving car, Jaffe's full Atlantic Cities piece is well worth your time, as is Burkhard Bilger's recent New Yorker story.

Previously in Slate:

• A First-Person View From Behind the Wheel of a Driverless Car
• Should Self-Driving Cars Obey Speed Limits?
• How Do You Ticket a Driverless Car?

On Saturday Microsoft posted a security advisory about a vulnerability that affects all versions of Internet Explorer from 6 to 11. Together, these versions comprise more than 56 percent of Internet browser market share. That's a lot of copies of vulnerable browsers.

The weakness could allow a hacker to distort what a given user's browser displays to trick him into clicking on a false link. This could then give the hacker control over his computer.

Microsoft said in its post that the company "is aware of limited, targeted attacks" exploiting the flaw. And FireEye, the cybersecurity company that found the weakness and sent it to Microsoft, reports that hackers are especially going after IE versions 9, 10, and 11 through the Adobe Flash plugin. Though that's a slightly smaller window, those three versions still represent almost 32 percent of total browser market share.

An easy solution to the problem is to let your last action in Internet Explorer be downloading a shiny new browser. But for people who aren't ready to jump ship, Microsoft has a list of workarounds while the company works on a solution, and a patch should be out in the next few weeks.

The vulnerability is also significant, though, because it marks the first discovery of a security flaw since Microsoft ended support for Windows XP. When the company patches the vulnerability, XP won't receive the update. Though other browsers like Chrome and Firefox are still supporting XP for now, this latest security flaw shows how crucial migrating away from XP really is—even though the 13-year-old operating system still has an amazing 28 percent market share. Brand loyalty is one thing, but everyone needs to stop using these old operating systems and versions of IE. Just stop.

It's hard to fit a bunch of people into a selfie. Usually that’s OK, because the more crowded the photo, the more your superior duck face and enviable popularity will shine through. The one problem is that if you're trying to show how awesome your vacation is, or how outdoorsy and fit you are, by capturing yourself in front of an impressive vista, it's difficult to get everything in the shot.

But drones can solve this! (Is there anything they can’t do?) They go where we want them to go, so of course they should be taking short videos of where we are and what we're up to. It's not a selfie. It's a dronie (not to be confused with "drony").

Vimeo has created a whole dronie channel, and pioneers of the genre—originally called the aerial selfie—like Photojojo founder Amit Gupta, have been posting dronies for a few months. NASA may be working on a Global Selfie, but dronies are better because they're only about you (the most important person).

Now go be awesome and smile for the drone!